DOMINION FIGHTING MEN

Evening Star, Issue 23909, 12 June 1941, Page 9

DOMINION FIGHTING MEN

HIGH STANDARD OF COURAGE AND ENDURANCE WHAT CAMPAIGN IN CRETE REVEALED (From the Official AVar Correspondent ■ with the N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO, June 10. Out of all the lessons so bitterly learned in the Balkan campaigns emerges the shining fact of the worth of our fighting men. Even before the Crete campaign, New Zealand had shown that she had given the British cause in this war a force whose proved and potential capabilities were nowhere surpassed. Then a clear week of fierce fighting in Crete before the talk of evacuation set the New Zealanders their full and final test, through which they passed with flying colours. A more difficult or more hazardous military operation than that carried out bv the New Zealanders in covering the withdrawal through Greece could not, at that time be imagined. I believe they gained a victory no less than if they had been ordered to advance instead of withdraw. As much a distinct military task as a counterattack was the role they were given m delaying an enemy force several times larger at fixed points along most of the 500-mile evacuation route, while the remaining British troops fell back to the beaches and embarked. Not only did they fulfil their part to the letter, (but they inflicted casualties which made their own seem negligible, and at the same time escaped as a force still intact and ready to fight again. That series of covering operations, carried out coolly and systematically under the ceaseless pressure of time and before the gathering weight of enemy forces may well (be regarded in the light of a New Zealand victory. TENSE HOURS. Only ou a few occasions did the New Zealand operations in Greece have anything of the spectacular unorthodoxy with which the name Anzac is apt to be associated by people who do not know these men. The main thread of the story in the campaign as I saw it was a sequence of tense hours and days in which coolness, endurance, discipline, and high morale combined to form a barrier which the enemy violence and weight of numbers could not break. These qualities, which were proved over and over throughout the withdrawal, were brought to light in the first days of the action. I remember an Austrian prisoner, one of 150 taken by Wellington infantrymen, telling me that the enemy’s troops expected to walk with comparative ease through tho opposing line after the Luftwaffe had paved the way with intensive bombing and strafing designed for moral as well as physical damage. There was no need to tell him the method would not achieve success. At that time, guided (by “ Deadeye Dick,” as the men nicknamed a reconnaissance plane which droned above us for two days, German artillery and dive-bombers were showering our infantry and gun positions with high explosives. The New Zealanders took that hell-five magnificently, and paid it hack more than fully with their own artillery and infantry action. A promise of Splendid things to come lay in the fact that from the nightmarish withdrawal and journeys through Greece our brigades emerged unbroken and' able to turn and fight again and again until their last stand was made with their backs to the sea. Significant, too, were the mastery the New Zealanders showed over the enemy troops on the early occasions when .they met them without the preoccupation of withdrawal operations, and the courage and initiative displayed by parties and individual soldiers who Lad to find their own way out of Greece. STERNEST TEST. . But now the Crete campaign overshadows Greece as the sternest testing ground for human endurance that history has ever known. There our men on the ground fought not only the enemy on the ground, but also the enemy in the air. While Britain saw a lull in the air war which may have been significant, the sky over Crete was filled from dawn to dark with the black crosses of the Luftwaffe insignia. German planes hammered our anti-aircraft defences until few were left, and then, to all intents and purposes, the sky was theirs. With numbers arid violence that grew rather than diminished, they dropped down to the roads, villages, and groves in endless low-flying swarms, always within a few minutes’ call of their ground forces, and constantly seeking to immobilise and unnerve their opposition. Our men had to fight them, not with guns, but sheer stoical endurance. What 1 thought most remarkable about the battle for Crete was the extreme coritrast it presented between the ultra-modern methods the Germans employed to gain a footing there and the old. style hand-to-hand fighting with which the New Zealanders so successfully, engaged them. Armchair tacticians, who in the past few years have done their best to bury the bayonet as an outdated infantry weapon would have been amazed at tho continual use of bare steel. The Germans showed time after time that they simply could not face it, although. it was often noticed that they were quick to reform and renew their heavy automatic fire after being scattered by

bayonet charges. The psychological effect was undeniable, and, more than that, many casualties wore inflicted by steel. FRESH LAURELS WON. A second noteworthy feature was tho fine conduct of troops who were not trained as infantry, but who plunged into battles which were no less fierce than those in which the regular riflemen were engaged. Clerks, signallers, drivers, technicians, and all the rest of those specialists who in normal warfare may never fire a shot lay out in forward posts and took part in patrol work and even bayonet charges—some of them without bayonets. Alost of them had been formed into rifle companies before the invasion began, but many afterwards turned riflemen voluntarily or through necessity. Men like these had already’ proved their worth in their own jobs, particularly in Greece, where tho drivers, apart from their outstanding routine work on long supply routes, played vital parts in the withdrawal of front-line troops, where engineers built bridges and miles of roads and blew them up again often in .touch-and-go circumstances; and where signallers maintained communications through areas under bombing and shellfire and frequently-changing troop locations. Now like the cavalrymen and artillerymen who also took up rifles they won fresh laurels in an unexpected way No praise, however, is too high for the regular infantrymen, Alaori and pnkeha alike. All in Crete shared the strain and constant air attacks, but our fighting men carried a tremendous burden of fatigue accumulated after sleepless nights, extreme physical exertion, and irregular meals. It was a miracle that gave them the strength and will power for the last fighting withdrawal on foot across the island. The miracle was inside them—the stuff they are made of.